EMPS Annual Background Screening Report 2011 

This report is a statistical analysis of all the background checks used to screen potential job applicants and screening trends within the South African industry in 2011. This analysis includes data from a wide range of industries within the South African business sector, including, but not limited to; retail, FMCG, fast-food, pharmaceutical, transport, motor, security, cash-in-transit, courier, legal, hospitality, entertainment, recruitment, finance and insurance. 

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The report looks at the prevalence of criminal and credit records, fraudulent information submitted by applicants and unverifiable data established through the background screening process.

2011 has been a very significant year overall for screening in South Africa, with the discontinuance of the criminal name/id search. This search itself was only available for the first 6-months of 2011, in which it rendered a very low 3% hit rate, down from 4% in 2010. This low percentage is by no means indicative of the true number of job applicants with criminal records but rather a reality of how unreliable the check actually was. On the 1st of July 2011 AFIS criminal fingerprint checking became the official and only legal means of doing criminal checks on potential applicants. Over the past 3 years since the inception of AFIS, despite the unreliability of name/ID search data, South African companies have been reluctant and slow to take-up AFIS, due to many logistical issues and cost implications. The switch-off of the name/id check has however quickly changed that, as over 70% of clients moved to AFIS in the last 6 months of 2011. The statistics, although down on the last 4 years still show that over 11% of job applicants have a criminal record. It's believed that the hit percentage has come down since 2008 due to greater volumes improving the data integrity.

Further analysis of criminal conviction data obtained from the AFIS system in 2011 shows that close to 60% of convictions are made up of assault, theft and road traffic offences. Theft alone is almost 20%. Fraud, housebreaking, robbery and possession of stolen goods make up a further 12%. Another 4% of convictions include murder, attempted murder, rape and sexual offenses. Of all applicants with criminal convictions, 25% are repeat offenders, 10% have between 3 and 9 offences. In one record case for EMPS a job applicant had 15 offences.

The percentage of applicants with credit records in 2011 remains fairly constant at 24%. According to Stephen Logan, an Independent Consumer Attorney-Of the 18 million credit active South Africans, 8.9 million have an adverse credit record. This being a very good reason not to decline employment purely based on the outcome of a credit record check.

In 2011, the number of academic qualifications not verified was 8.5%, although still very high, down from 12 in 2010. With a 25% unemployment rate, the situation that many job applicants find themselves in, is still a desperate and dire one. False ID documents remained at 9% of ID documents unverifiable.

A study done by the Aberdeen Group in September 2010, also shows that screening is fundamental to Best-in-class performing companies*. *Best-in-class are the top 20% of performers, measured on first-year retention of new hires, percentage of new-hires that were top-choice candidates and an average year-on-year decrease in time to fill vacant positions. The research found that 83% of Best-in-class utilise employment screening (i.e. background checks), companies using background screening are 43% more likely to achieve Best-in-class results and 51% of Best-in-class utilise skills assessments and analysis tools.
 
It also showed the quality of hires increased 7% year-on-year for companies using screening. Further, companies that use all three of the most common elements of screening (background checking, employment/education verification AND reference checking) improve the quality of their hire even more.

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